The paper deals primarily with obligatory translation shifts involving translating English texts from and into Arabic and specifies the sub-components of a proposed model of quality assurance specifications and performance translator assessment. Obligatory shifts involve substituting English non-finite embedded forms with finite ones, lexicalizing certain grammatical elements, making agreement in gender between Arabic adjectives and nouns and Arabic nouns and verbs, substituting emphatic ‘do’ with the appropriate rhetorical device, supplying an antecedent to the translated Arabic relative constructions, transposing English initial noun clauses and sentence modifiers to post-verbal positions, placing the definite noun rather than its referent in initial positions, rendering certain English adjectives into verbs, nouns or adjectival clauses, replacing existential ‘there’ and the English grammatical subject ‘it’ with the appropriate corresponding forms, substituting the English comma with the Arabic conjunctive ‘wa’-and or ‘aw’-or as a linking device, deleting the corresponding form of copula be in Arabic interrogatives and replacing certain English noun modifiers with the appropriate similitude construction. The proposed model of quality assurance specifications and performance translator assessment examines the communicative, situational, semantic, structural, stylistic, pragmatic, textual, aesthetic, rhetorical, lexical and informational aspects of the translated text which are essential for assessing the quality of the text and the performance of the translator.

When Guy Miège ventured into dictionary-making in London in 1677, his aim was to stand up against Randle Cotgrave’s celebrated Dictionary of the French and English Tongues. Among other concerns, Miège, a teacher of French, considered Cotgrave’s dictionary useless for pedagogical purposes. The Dictionaire Royal Augmenté, a French-Latin work by Jesuit Father François Pomey, was to become Miège’s guide in reforming Cotgrave. Miège found in Pomey’s dictionary an amalgam of microstructural features developed by an experienced pedagogue of language. Miège proceeded to adapt the features of Pomey’s dictionary to his own working languages, French and English. He borrowed, altered, abridged, and enlarged Pomey’s material, tinted it with his own personal touch, and designed the accurate and reliable pedagogical aid he wanted to produce in his New Dictionary French and English, with another English and French.

Johnson’s method of incorporating illustrative quotations from previous authors into his Dictionary creates a ‘space of pastness,’ in which some decontextualized authors can be used by Johnson to argue or represent views in the present. The illustrations quoted in the Dictionary are de-historicized; indeed the Dictionary itself is not concerned with a history of language or diachronic development. Yet one must be cautious in assessing and using evidence from the quotations. In the case of John Milton, Johnson adjusts and re-places Milton’s ideological symbolic value, quoting him in rhetorically, usually self-reflexive ways, and reads him, in part, through the eyes and works of Alexander Pope. Finally, it has been shown that in the Preface to the Dictionary, Johnson thematizes the elusiveness of the present and its tragic overtones of regret, failure, and death. The Preface is preoccupied with time and time’s passing.

The present study falls within the theoretical framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, wherewith three translations of Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd,” are analysed. It is a tale of mystery that incorporates remarkable expressions of modernity at both thematic and narrative levels. The first translation was published in instalments in 1873 ­ a mode of publication that contradicts the very concept of ‘brief tale’ and the ‘unique or single effect’ advocated by the author. The second is from 1934 and the third from 1982, representing, therefore, very distant historical moments and in which the translating work itself denotes the existent translation concept. At the same time, comparison with the analysis of the original text allows for the finding of which procedures were employed in its transfer to the linguistic, literary and cultural polysystem of Portugal at every moment of every translation. This comparison also shows how the meaning of Poe’s text is built, a process to which various strategies and devices concur at the linguistic and the textual, narrative levels

The call for longitudinal evidence on the efficacy of written corrective feedback (WCF) for ESL (English as a second language) writers has been made repeatedly since Truscott (<xref ref-type=”bibr” rid=”B59″>1996</xref>) claimed that it is ineffective, harmful, and should therefore be abandoned. This article discusses some of the theoretical issues raised against the practice, outlines the status of recent empirical evidence and presents a 10-month study of the effects of WCF on two functional uses of the English article system given to 52 low-intermediate ESL students in Auckland, New Zealand. Assigned to four groups (direct corrective feedback, written, and oral meta-linguistic explanation; direct corrective feedback and written meta-linguistic explanation; direct corrective feedback only; the control group), the students produced five pieces of writing (pre-test, immediate post-test, and three delayed post-tests). Each of the treatment groups outperformed the control group on all post-tests and no difference in effectiveness was found between the three treatment groups.

This paper seeks to respond to current and on-going criticism of the first and only English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe. It reconsiders the translator-publisher dynamic by applying Bruno Latour’s sociological framework in order to arrive at more detailed and comprehensive conclusions. After briefly presenting the publication, reception, and the criticism of the English translation, this paper investigates into the case study with the help of Latour and the letters from the Smith College Archives. The study was based on the reading of historical documents B more than a hundred letters between the translator, Howard M. Parshley, and the publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. A brief overview of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is presented and then followed by two examples of application of the theoretical framework. The paper concludes by insisting that the involvement of multiple actors and their influence on translation products should receive more attention when considering the work of translators.

Since the mid-20th century, graduate schools in the USA have witnessed a growing participation of international students, many of whom do not speak English as their first language. Previous research has often portrayed non-native-English-speaking (NNES) students in US doctoral programs as disadvantaged because of the presumed primacy of English in their academic pursuits. This study examines NNES doctoral students participation in US academia, and in doing so, challenges this assumption. Drawing on the concepts of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Lave 1996; Wenger 1998) and capital (Bourdieu 1977, 1991), the study analyzes how linguistic competence plays out in NNES students participation in three different disciplines. We argue that language competence as cultural capital does not have the same value across different disciplines and may not always be critical to NNES studentsacademic success. Furthermore, despite their keen awareness of their differences from their native-speaking counterparts, the NNES doctoral students in this study had other forms of cultural capital with which they claimed legitimacy and recognition in their disciplinary communities.

This article examines, in the context of Chinese discourse on translation, a phenomenon observable in translation studies in the Euro-American world in the last few decades, namely the reconceptualization of translation. Based on historical research, the article shows that in different periods in the history of translation in China, there have been repeated attempts to respond to the realities of translation of the time by offering new (as opposed to established) conceptualizations and explications of translation (fanyi ). What these conceptualizations are will be analyzed with reference to a number of texts taken from different periods of Chinese discourse on translation. The article will also explore the connections amongst these conceptualizations and show how a mental frame could be produced that could serve as the blueprint of a project of international collaborative research, one in which ethnocentric bias of all kinds will have no place. In the last section of the article, the author will continue the tradition of reconceptualizing translation by offering one more definition of fanyi

Clavel Arroitia, Begoña and María Goretti Zaragoza Ninet “Implementación de un Proyecto de Innovación Educativa en la titulación de Filología Inglesa de la Universidad de Valencia.”Implementation of an Innovation in Education Project in the Degree of English Studies at the University of ValenciaPorta Linguarum. Revista Internacional de Didáctica de las Lenguas Extranjeras vol., n. 13 (2010). pp. 103-118. http://www.ugr.es/~portalin/articulos/PL_numero13/7.%20Begogna%20Clavel.pdf

Recent literary manifestos claim that the center is no longer the center (Le Devoir 2007). Indeed, it is generally admitted that Quebec literature has been more or less independent from the French field since the 1970’s. However, the analysis of the translation of this literature Bits international circulation, and the almost compulsory stopover in France before being selected for translation by the agents of other literary fieldsB reveals various mechanisms through which the French symbolic center still exerts its power. Drawing on the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to the international space (Casanova 1999; Sapiro 2007, 2008; etc.), this article argues that translation could be considered as the ultimate variable when testing literary domination, especially in the case of peripheral fields claiming independence. I will illustrate this through the case of Quebec literature translated in Spain (into Spanish and Catalan) between 1975 and 2004.

There is a lot more to language than language, a lot more to English than English. This will not come as news to teachers, policy-makers, applied linguists, sociolinguists, or indeed to anyone who has taken a moment to think seriously about the stuff that flows from our mouths and pens. We all know that, as Philip Seargeant writes, ‘our use of language is always influenced by the ideas we form of language’ (p. 1), and we all know, too, that these ideas are inextricably enmeshed with a variety of non-linguistic factors.

This paper describes an approach used to test the expressive power of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and its tiny set of semantic primitives. A small dictionary was created, using NSM to paraphrase definitions for each word in the controlled defining vocabulary of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). Student participants performed several headword-identification tasks to evaluate the quality of these definitions. The resulting 2000-word dictionary is non-circular, and by extension provides non-circular definitions for all the words in the LDOCE.

This paper deals with the translation from Arabic to English of lists, i.e. phrases consisting of at least two, and typically three or more, noun phrases, adjective phrases, etc. which belong to a relatively coherent semantic field. Section 1 considers four standard techniques for translating Arabic semantic repetition into English: maintenance of repetition, merging, grammatical transposition, and semantic distancing. Section 2 defines listing as an extension of semantic repetition, and identifies basic listing structures in English and Arabic. Sections 3-3.5 look at techniques for translating Arabic lists into English on the basis of the first three translation techniques for semantic repetition discussed in Section 2. Section 3.1 looks at list retention (cf. maintenance of repetition), considering where this is and is not acceptable. Section 3.2 looks at list reduction/merging (cf. semantic merging). Sections 3.3-3.5 look at techniques which parallel grammatical transposition as a technique for translation semantic repetition: embedded coordination, as a form of subordination (Section 3.3), standard subordination (Section 3.4), and the combination of embedded coordination with standard subordination (Section 3.5). Section 3.6 considers summary definition, as a translation technique which goes beyond merging. Section 4 considers the significance of listing patterns in Arabic and English in the context of the more general preference in Arabic for coordination and in English for subordination. Section 5 raises the possibility that the preference for coordination in Arabic may correlate with a larger textual preference for ostensive presentation, while the preference for subordination in English may correlate with a larger textual preference for analytical summary. I suggest that, if true, this may give rise to translation issues which are effectively intractable.

Dinçkan, Ye and Im “Culture-Bound Collocations in Bestsellers: A Study of Their Translations from English into Turkish.”Meta vol. 55, n. 3 (2010). pp. 456-473. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/045065ar

The reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) included a period of enormous political, social, and cultural innovation and change. The Victorians made great advances in science, technology, and the arts, sought creative solutions to social problems, and created a body of literature that continues to fascinate and inspire readers, artists, and scholars. Our collective fascination with the Victorian era, its continuing influence on our lives, and the plethora of extant primary source material, make it a rich period for research. Although scholars have a wealth of print resources available in this area, it is also useful to explore the Web as a source of scholarly information

Modals are a source of difficulty in translation due to the subtle and complex nature of the meanings they convey, as well as the diversity of formal means by which modal meaning is coded from one language to another. The present study sheds light on difficulties associated with the translation of modal expressions by exploring errors in the translations of a group of native Arabic-speaking translator trainees, and identifies difficulties they experienced in transferring modal meaning from an English source text (ST) to an Arabic target text (TT). Shortcomings in the skills and training of the participants are discussed in the light of these findings, and suggestions are given as to how these may be remedied.The results of the study show that while the students generally exhibit a sound knowledge of the dictionary meanings of the modal expressions in the ST, the precise sense of a given modal was often misconstrued and in many cases the modal meaning was missing entirely from the translations. These problems suggest that the participants tended to process the meanings of the ST at the word and sentence level while neglecting broader macro-level meanings conveyed in the text (e.g. cohesion, text type, relationship between author and audience).The study reveals that in addition to the need for students to develop greater awareness of the nature of modality and its expression in both English and Arabic, greater emphasis is needed in the training of the students on the improvement of topdown text processing skills.

Although fuzziness is one of the innate characteristics of language, shared by both Chinese and English, there do exist apparent differentiations between them as far as their roles in aesthetic-effect-generating, representation mode, application field suitability and aesthetic impact are concerned, which has remained a great challenge and regret in either English to Chinese (E-C) or Chinese to English (C-E) translation, particularly in the latter. It’s no exaggeration to say that translation is a profession with no lack of regret and translators are professional regret-tasters. The most impressive regret in C-E translation might lie in the fact that the talent and capability of the translators is painfully restricted in reproducing and conveying the aesthetic effect of Chinese fuzzy expressions.

Estudi comparatiu de les dues traduccions catalanes publicades de David Copperfield de Charles Dickens. La primera de Josep Carner feta l any 1930 però publicada el 1964 i la segona obra de Joan Sellent del 2003. L anàlisi mostra que ambdues traduccions, excel·lents, reflecteixen una evolució singular i força accelerada del model de llengua que els traductors fan arribar al seu públic, que és reflex de la complexa història de la llengua catalana del segle xx, que encara s ha d escriure. A comparative study of the two published Catalan translations of Charles Dickens David Copperfield, the first translated by Josep Carner in 1930 but not published until 1964, and the second by Joan Sellent in 2003. The analysis shows that both translations, magnificent, reflect the unique evolution of the language model that the translators pass on to their readers, an evolution shaped by the complex history of the Catalan language in the 20th century, which is still to be written.

Non-native, English-speaking undergraduate and graduate students were directly surveyed about their language preference at an academic reference desk. Most prefer reference transactions initially in English but, if uncertain about the outcome, would like follow-up help in their primary language. Differences by academic level and country of origin were observed.

Coinciding with the global boom in commercial English language teaching is the development of a sizeable publishing industry in which UK-produced textbooks for the teaching of English as an international or foreign language are core products. This article takes the view that these curriculum artefacts can also be understood as cultural artefacts in which English is made to mean in highly selective ways. The article focuses specifically on representations of the world of work in textbooks from the late 1970s until the present and shows how they have drawn consistently on evolving discourses of the new capitalism. It argues that students are repeatedly interpellated in these materials to the subject position of white-collar individualism in which the world of work is overwhelmingly seen as a privileged means for the full and intense realization of the self along lines determined largely by personal choice. The article concludes by suggesting that such materials have increasingly constructed English as a branded commodity along lines which are entirely congruent with the values and practices of the new capitalism.

The main concern of this article is to provide an analysis of the syntactic classes of Arabic passive participle forms and discuss their translations based on a comparative study of two English Quranic translations by Ali (1934) and Pickthall (1930). The study attempts to answer two questions: (a) Should we translate the Arabic passive participle into an English nominal, verbal, adjectival or adverbial? and (b) What are the factors that determine the choice of one translation or the other? So, it compares the two translations to analyze the different English translations of the Arabic passive participle. A corpus of 350 sentences has been randomly selected from the source text, together with their 700 translations in the target texts. The two translations of all the sentences are compared and analyzed in terms of syntactic and semantic features. The various English translations of the Arabic passive participle forms are presented with a count of the examples representing them in the corpus and their percentages. Then, the contextual reference of each translation is studied and accounted for.

In his article, “Indeterminacy, Multivalence and Disjointed Translation”, Jiang, an intelligent, talented, well-read and highly-motivated non-native speaker of English, provides a critical commentary on literary translations into English from Chinese, and further, attempts to build a theory on the work of non-native speakers of English who have attempted to translate poetry from Chinese into English. A great deal of thought and reading has gone into the attempt, and although it was arguably bound to end in tears, it raises three important issues which ought to engender debate in the pages of Target.

An important decision in dictionary design is the treatment given to borrowings or foreign words, that is, whether they should be included in cases of widespread usage (following a descriptive perspective), or rejected because the lexicographer considers that they are undesirable (from a prescriptive approach). This paper analyses the treatment of Anglicisms in a modern bilingual specialized English-Spanish dictionary series and shows that the lexicographers have often avoided the inclusion of Anglicisms, even when either amply documented among expert users or accepted by prescriptive authorities. Our analysis shows that this attitude may not reflect actual usage and, what is possibly more problematic, entails at times a neglect of potentially confusing items, such as false Anglicisms. This study also illustrates some of the consequences of the choice between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and suggests that some intermediate positions might be possible and helpful for dictionary users.

Purpose – This paper seeks to recommend a basic core collection of works by and about J.R.R. Tolkien for libraries by grade level. Design/methodology/approach – The author draws on her experience as a Tolkien scholar and editor of one of the major journals in the field. Findings – A basic collection should include some works beyond the well-known Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Practical implications – The paper provides an ideal list for the library seeking to prepare for interest generated by the new Hobbit movie currently in production. Originality/value – While there are other bibliographies on Tolkien available, particularly on fan and society web sites, this one is arranged by grade level and includes audio-visual materials and recent scholarly and reference works, and is designed for library rather than personal use.

Point of view in narrative has been identified in literary stylistics through the use of deixis, modality, transitivity and Free Indirect Discourse. These findings have also been applied to literature in translation (Bosseaux 2007). This article focuses on deictic cues in the narrative structure of Canne al Vento by Grazia Deledda in the original Italian and the English translation, following an earlier study focussing on constructing a particular point of view through mental processes of perception, the translation of which did not always reflect that point of view (Johnson 2010). Data emerging from a corpus-assisted study is examined qualitatively using a systemic-functional model in order to assess to what extent the point of view constructed by these cues in the ST is conveyed in the novel in translation.

Across the globe, the use of English is a popular advertising technique. The ever expanding body of studies on this topic has revealed a number of explanations for the use of English in the advertising. It can be related to the larger marketing strategy of a campaign, to the cultural connotations English carries, or English can be used for creative-linguistic reasons. The current article, however, will present an analysis of four examples of advertisements in which English is used for reasons that have not been discussed in the scholarly literature so far. More specifically, in these advertisements, which intertextually refer to a range of British and American media genres, specific registers of English are used to mark the generic intertextuality of the ads. The analysis, I believe, sheds new light on the use of English in the media, and more particularly on issues such as viewers agency and linguistic superiority.

Generally speaking, the message of a poem is conveyed on three levels: the semantic, the syntactic, and the phonological. How translatable each of these levels is to the translator depends on how much cognation there is between source and target language: the more cognation there is, the more translatable each of these levels. Thus, in respect of all three levels, translation between languages of the same family, such as English and French, both of which belong to the Indo-European family, is easier than translation between languages of different families, such as English and Chinese, which belong respectively to the Indo-European and the Sino-Tibetan family.If a further distinction is to be made, one may say that, in translation between Chinese and European languages, the semantic level is less challenging than both the syntactic and the phonological level, since syntactic and phonological features are language-bound, and do not lend themselves readily to translation, whereas language pairs generally have corresponding words and phrases on the semantic level to express similar ideas or to describe similar objects, events, perceptions, and feelings. As an image owes its existence largely to its semantic content, the imagery of a poem is easier to translate than its phonological features. Be that as it may, there is yet another difference: the difference between the imagery of non-dramatic poetry and the imagery of poetic drama when it comes to translation. With reference to Hamlet and its versions in Chinese and in European languages, this paper discusses this difference and the challenges which the translator has to face when translating the imagery of poetic drama from one language into another; it also shows how translating Shakespeare’s imagery from English into Chinese is more formidable than translating it from English into other European languages.

This article used video-editing software to explore the temporal aspects of the live coverage of the Academy Awards Ceremonies, which employed simultaneous interpretation (SI) and open Korean captions at the same time. The results showed that the Korean captions appeared 7.24 seconds after the beginning of the original sentences and remained on the screen 7.52 after the end of original. These figures were statistically longer than other live coverage of the same events with SI alone and other TV programs carrying live captions. It was also found that relatively short original sentences were omitted in SI and the long EVS (ear-voice-span) also left the sentences that followed uninterpreted. In spite of the long time lag, questionnaires indicated that viewers preferred SI through open captions to SI alone presumably because they could listen to the original voices of entertainers without being disturbed by the voice-over of SI.

The main purpose of the study was to investigate the distinctness and reliability of analytic (or multi-trait) rating dimensions and their relationships to holistic scores and e-rater essay feature variables in the context of the TOEFL computer-based test (TOEFL CBT) writing assessment. Data analyzed in the study were holistic and multi-trait essay scores provided by human raters and essay feature variable scores computed by e-rater (version 2.0) for two TOEFL CBT writing prompts. It was found that (i) all of the six multi-trait scores were not only correlated among themselves but also correlated with the holistic score, (ii) high correlations obtained among holistic and multi-trait scores were largely attributable to the impact of essay length on both holistic and multi-trait scoring, and (iii) some strong associations were confirmed between several e-rater variables and multi-trait rating dimensions. Implications are discussed for improving the multi-trait scoring of essays, refining e-rater essay feature variables, and validating automated essay scores.

Translation is to reproduce the meaning and style of a source language text in a target language text in consideration of the cultural differences. Because of dramatic differences between the cultures, translators have to sacrifice something, such as time, religious connotation, and the wording of the original poem to obtain its aesthetic value and its original beauty. In this paper the author examines the poetry translation focusing on the basic concepts of cultural translation and the difficulties of Chinese poetry translation, and special attentions are paid on losses and the strategies in the translation. Beginning from the basic concepts of cultural translation, the paper expounds the essence of the cultural translation in order to lay a sound foundation for the following analysis of the poetry translation. In Part 2, the paper points out the difficulties of Chinese poetry translation that arise from the differences between Chinese and English cultures. Part 3 is a tentative analysis of the losses in the English translation of Chinese poetry and categorizes the losses into four groups: the loss of time, the loss of religious connotation, the loss in wording, the loss of allusion. To address the losses, the author proposes several strategies such as free translation, transfer of allusion and annotation.

The present study aims to analyse wordplay translation on the basis of the three aspects mentioned in the title ­ wordplay typology, translation techniques and relevant factors. The theoretical framework is eclectic but draws particularly on Delabastita (1996, 1997) and Lladó (2002). Empirical analysis is based on three English source texts and six Catalan translations, and focuses on two main issues: the frequency distribution of pairs of ST + TT segments across translation techniques, and the possible correlation(s) between translation techniques and factors influencing decision-making. It is observed that translators tend to use techniques implying a negative punning balance, i.e. resulting in some degree of loss of punning activity. Moreover, some factors identified in the literature are seen to correlate with the use of particular translation techniques. Finally, in the last section an attempt is made to go beyond description and explanation and to assess wordplay translation techniques in terms of their suitability as translation solutions.

Purpose – By reconstructing the genealogy of digital humanities through examining digital humanities projects and evaluative writings, this paper aims to identify core arguments related to disciplinary transformation and pedagogy in the humanities fields. It also seeks to consider knowledge production and transformation of a general humanistic attitude (the Humanities Program) in relation to digital tools. The paper also seeks to examine its perceived impact on disciplinary development, pedagogy, and forms of digital text. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a literature-based conceptual analysis of distinct and diverse aspects of the enterprise of digital humanities, by identifying their main foci together with implications of these preoccupations within larger discourses. The analysis is grounded in a close reading of 45 exemplary texts published from the 1980s to date, and 14 exemplary projects and initiatives. The analysis highlights several concepts with their underlying assumptions. Findings – The perceived epistemological advantage of digital technology for new forms of reasoning is that community development has produced theoretical frameworks and shaped practical directions. The paper identified three distinct formations characterized by associated digital artifacts: prominent opinion leaders, foundational projects, and document forms (morphs). Research limitations/implications – Research data are not comprehensive. Selected texts and projects are exemplary. The results and findings are relevant for the English-language context and limited by a selective corpus. Originality/value – The paper outlines a historical trajectory of digital humanities and the formative stages of development from the discourses of that evolving field. It also identifies constructions of technological advantage with implications for knowledge production in the writing of humanities scholars. The paper contributes to practitioner awareness of the history of digital humanities practice.

Nonsense is the subversive and creative use of language par excellence. It turns the semantic and pragmatic values of words and utterances upside down, challenging our interpretation skills, indeed our sense of logic and understanding. Nonsense may be humorous ­ actually playing a crucial role in generating the comedy of a text ­ but it is not necessarily so; it may be unsettling or simply puzzling. The various roles assigned to nonsense since it made its appearance in the world’s literatures, the fact that it may be found in different genres ­ prose, poetry and drama, even though poetry seems to be its natural home ­ and in the works of writers from different times and styles, together with its elusive definition, may all explain why it has hardly been studied as a literary genre in its own right and why it has not received much attention from Translation Studies researchers. Various articles and volumes on the translation of wordplay ­ a nonsense creating device, but certainly not the only one ­ have been published (e.g. Delabastita 1996 and 1997), but Pilar Orero’s is the first comprehensive monograph on nonsense as a genre from a translation standpoint.

The article addresses a number of topical issues relating to court interpreting. After examining a number of issues discussed among US interpreters in July 2009, it considers the provision of court interpreting in a number of different English-speaking jurisdictions, including the position of agencies. It presents the cost of a lack of judicial awareness of the issues involved in providing competent interpreting in legal proceedings, and looks at how rare languages are dealt with in the United States. It examines best practice and how this can quickly turn into worst practice. It considers the situation in Canada s Province of Ontario, where a class action has been brought against the Ministry of the Attorney General for failing to provide competent interpreting services. The discussion poses a number of questions, and considers whether court interpreting is condemned to be an undervalued and misunderstood profession in many jurisdictions, or whether there is reason to hope for improvement. (A.)

Every article sent by an author to a reputed scientific journal undergoes a rigorous editorial evaluation. The editor has the final responsibility of accepting or rejecting manuscripts and thus can confer authority and validity on the author’s research and help to disseminate new knowledge. In this task, editors make use of a panel of expert peer reviewers in the field who examine the manuscript and make recommendations. Some aspects of the peer review process have been investigated by medical scientists and by linguists but to the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies conducted on peer reviewer comments of medical articles written in English by Italian researchers. The present study aimed to establish the most frequent types of comments made by peer reviewers to identify the most frequent linguistic problems that Italian researchers encounter in this process. A collection of clinical research manuscripts submitted by Italian medical researchers to reputable English language journals were analysed together with the comments by editors and reviewers. The most frequent comments and criticisms were mainly in the area of scientific and methodological content, followed by lexical and grammatical errors, clarity and verbosity or repetition. An awareness of the features which might affect the acceptance or rejection of manuscripts may help novice writers and furnish training materials to aid researchers in writing publications in English.

The term intelligibility is widely viewed as denoting an ideologically neutral concept and therefore useful in speculating about the future of the English language, especially in the context of its expansion at the current exponential rate and the danger or otherwise of its breaking up into mutually incomprehensible languages, the way Latin did in the Middle Ages. It has also been bandied about in the context of English language teaching, especially to speakers of other languages. In this piece, I question the status of intelligibility as an ideologically innocent concept and argue that the adjective intelligible is analogous to others such as beautiful, ugly, easy, difficult, primitive, civilized, and so forth, which are also sometimes used with respect to languages, and which we have long learned to regard with suspicion on the grounds that they invariably presuppose the standpoint of someone who furtively manages to remain invisible.

The present study investigates Jordanian students’ ability to translate English binomials into Arabic and explores the strategies used when translating them into Arabic. It also investigates the usefulness of English–Arabic dictionaries. For this purpose, a 25-item translation test was developed and distributed to two groups; an advanced group including 30 MA students, and an intermediate group comprising 50 undergraduate students studying English at Jordanian universities.The study revealed that the subjects’ general performance on the translation test was unsatisfactory. The percentage of correct answers on all items for all subjects was approximately 44%. This means that more than half of the test items in the translation test were erroneously rendered. The subjects used different strategies to translate English binomials into Arabic. The most frequently used strategy was contextualized guessing, followed by avoidance, literal translation, incomplete translation and least used, semantic approximation. Finally, with regard to the incorporation of English binomials along with their equivalents in Arabic in the English Arabic dictionaries, it was found that they were the highest in Al-Mawrid Dictionary 72%, followed by Atlas Dictionary 60%, and finally Oxford Wordpower 52%. Some binomials were included in one dictionary, others were included in only two dictionaries. Five binominals, or 20% of binomials under investigation, namely for and against, ifs and buts, heart and hand, here and now and nuts and bolts were missing in all of the dictionaries. This indicates the need to compile specialized English–Arabic dictionaries to address multi-word units such as collocations, idioms, and binomials, or at least to upgrade or enrich the currently used ones.

Abstract This paper explores the possibilities of translating German modals into English. One objective is to provide translators with a guide on translating modals by making them aware of the wide diversity of meanings and nuances of German modals and by helping them find the best translation possible for a given context. This guide is intended to be a dictionary for translators that is more parole-orientated and user-friendly than standard dictionaries. At the same time the paper also presents a yet undiscussed linguistic approach to analyzing one aspect of two languages in the context of translations. The excerpt starts out with theoretical aspects on the topic and continues with displaying the results of the analysis of one German modal, namely mögen. The analysis was conducted by browsing through various dictionaries and translation corpora. In the end, we can see a first attempt of a translator’s dictionary. It’s also clear to see that German modals are complex words with multiple meanings and facets and that most of the equivalences found are one-to-many equivalences.

In this paper, we study how single-word term extraction and bilingual lexical alignment can be used and combined to assist terminologists when they compile bilingual specialized dictionaries. Two specific tools ­ namely a term extractor called TermoStat and a sentence and lexical aligner called Alinea ­ are tested in a specific project the aim of which is the development of an English-French dictionary on climate change. We analyze the results of lexical alignment based on a typology of terminology equivalents. We first extracted French candidate terms that were then submitted to the lexical aligner

This book represents a diversity of research perspectives on English as a foreign language (EFL) narratives in three different continents (South America, Asia, and Europe). Fully aware of the complexity of the field, the editors adopt the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to capture the multi-layered and interactive nature of the processes implied in learning and teaching EFL. Each turn of the narrative kaleidoscope gives an insight on the intricacies of learning/teaching context. The conscious move from the ‘learning as acquisition’ to ‘learning as participation’ depicts a learner who actively deploys strategies and constructs hypotheses. It highlights an emotional and reflexive dimension of the teaching process, thus presenting participants who try to cope with or resist institutional frameworks.

As the subtitle indicates, the essays in Through Other Eyes deal with the translation of Anglophone literature in Europe. Originally contributions to a conference on “The Institution of Translation”, held at the University of Provence in 2006, the essays present a broad array of descriptive and methodological perspectives on the translation of English-language literatures in Europe since the Renaissance. The research field covered is thus considerably wide and complex, yet this broad scope is somewhat compensated for by the division of the volume into three parts: the first part deals with specific problems of translation methodology, the second part focuses on literary translation and the essays of part three adopt a specifically historical perspective on the translation of English texts into French.

This article discusses the conceptual design of BEST (Bilingualized English-Spanish Thesaurus), an online dictionary prototype for learners in the architecture and building construction domain. Since the users targeted by this dictionary must create specialized texts, they need reading and writing skills. The aim of this resource is thus to represent information in such a way as to help users to encode and decode specialized texts. As an example, this article focuses on the concept of window, an extremely complex object in architecture. It analyzes the different ways that window can be represented and the dimensions or perspectives from which it can be defined (i.e. multidimensionality). This analysis of window can be applied to other concepts in the domain. This study shows how information extracted from specialized lexicographic resources enriched with corpus data can be used to represent specialized concepts. Such representations help users to acquire specialized knowledge and also to produce texts.

This paper aims to examine the clash between languages and cultures as identified in the treatment of news events, with particular reference to the Falklands, or Malvinas in their Spanish denomination, in British and Spanish Internet news portals. English, as a global language, and Spanish, as its main European rival, exemplify a conflict between two languages and cultures that attempt to achieve or maintain world dominance, a battle that has been taken to the Internet arena in recent years. Thus, El País newspaper launched an English version for their Internet readers whereas the BBC produced a Spanish version of its English news service.

Vázquez Orta, Ignacio “A contrastive analysis of the use of modal verbs in the expression of epistemic stance in Business Management research articles in English and Spanish.”Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (AELFE) vol., n. 19 (2010). pp. 77-96. http://www.aelfe.org/documents/04_19_Vazquez.pdf

In the present paper an intercultural quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of modal verbs as epistemic stance markers in SERAC (Spanish-English Research Article Corpus), a corpus of research articles (RAs) in different disciplines, is carried out. The corpus selected for this research consists of 48 Business Management research articles. Special emphasis is laid on the introduction and discussion sections of RAs, where stance devices are most frequently located to pursue convergence with the readership. This kind of intercultural analysis has been achieved through both a bottom-up research approach and a top-down research approach. The results obtained in this study point in the direction that there are obvious differences between the use of modal verbs by native writers and the use of modal verbs by non-native Spanish writers. The most remarkable aspect is that Spanish writers show a deviant handling of hedges and boosters. Therefore, they have difficulties in establishing a proper tenor when they write in English

One of the most prominent linguistic features of classical Chinese poetry is syntactic indeterminacy, which brings about multivalence, i.e. multiplicity of connotation, and poses a great problem as well as daunting challenge to Chinese-English translators, for English is basically a language with syntactic determinacy. This paper examines two aspects of indeterminacy involved in classical Chinese poetry, arguing that ‘disjointed translation’ is probably the most inspiring way to cope with Chinese syntactic indeterminacy.

This paper compares three translators, Chi-chen Wang, the Yangs, and William A Lyell, who translated Lu Xun, the most important and a canonized Chinese writer in the twentieth century, so as to examine how non-linguistic factors affect translation.Beginning from the introduction of the divergence of the translators’ identities, motivations and socio-cultural background, the paper analyzes the reasons of their preferences in selections of originals, different translation strategies and different translation products.To introduce real China to the Americans in the 1920s, Wang translated the best stories of Lu Xun into fluent American English, with the difficult and unimportant cultural terms simplified or omitted. The Yangs worked for a nation-sponsored publishing house on mainland China and their translations of Lu Xun in the 1960s were attached with much political significance, which partly explained the closeness and literalness of their translation. While Lyell, an American scholar translating Lu Xun in the 1990s, is more scholarly in his translation, containing very detailed explanations and notes of cultural elements.This paper is not to judge but to find out how translations are like what they are under certain circumstances and in certain historical periods.